It was about 2am. Emily was in bed, and I was working on a new weather system for the Island (which will make things very interesting if you're playing a Robot, by the way). I was just about to save and go to bed when there was this bloody loud clattering and banging from downstairs.

For context - our house has what we've started to refer to as an "airlock." Posh people might call it a dust room, if it weren't so full of junk - it's basically a little tiny room that you go through in between the front door and the actual house. If I got my act together and cleared out the crap, we could use it as a room to take your shoes off, y'know, put a little chair in there, all civilised-like. Right now we just keep one door closed all the time (like an airlock!) so that the cats don't get out through the front door. There's a lock on the inner door, but seeing as it's pretty much one great big glass panel, there's little point in locking it - so we don't bother.

And in this airlock, barely an hour ago as I type this, there was a stranger.

Yeah. These are shit pictures I know, they were taken on a camera phone. I don't know if you can quite make it out, but in case you can't, and for the benefit of our blind players, that's a tall, slender man wearing a black suit, black shirt, black tie, black fucking bowler hat of all things, white gloves, and a rather unsetting black and gold mask. One of those scary masquerade ones with the long nose.

To say that I was surprised would be an understatement.

As I saw him, my foot slipped on the bottom stair, and I went down on my arse. I barely noticed - even as my coxyx bounced off the step, my eyes never left the guy. Emily was coming down by now, woken up by all the noise of this guy banging about, rattling the glass in its pane, knocking his fists against the glass:

I yelled at Emily to run upstairs and call the police, and I reached behind the fishtank for the rusty old bit of gas pipe we kept hidden there for exactly this eventuality (being from England I don't like guns, but we live in a very violent neighbourhood - compromises).

I told him to get the fuck out of my house. I tried to sound like a hard man, but it came out as a whisper.

Ice-cold with adrenaline, everything seemed to take on a bit more detail - I noticed things about the guy I hadn't noticed up until now.

The first thing I noticed was the way he moved. This guy could move his head as fast as you can move your eyes. His head twitched back and forth like a sparrow's, and he kept turning this way and that; I get the impression that each eye wanted to get a good look at me.

Then, I realised that he couldn't work the door handle. For whatever reason, the unlocked door was keeping him from me, at least for now.

Then, finally - you'd think I'd notice this first, but adrenaline works in funny ways like that - I noticed his face. He was wearing some sort of black hood, underneath the mask - no skin on display at all. At least, I thought it was a black hood - then he opened his mouth, and when I say mouth, it's very important that you realise that I mean a black slit where his mouth should be. If he was wearing a hood, you should be able to see the inside of his mouth, right? It would show up against the black, yeah?

Not if the hood folds in all the way inside his mouth and down his throat, you won't.

With trembling fingers, I took out my phone with my left hand - being in my right hand pocket this was tricky, but I didn't want to put down the pipe - switched to camera mode and just kept on pressing Capture. Click, click, click, click, click, while he stalked around silently inside the airlock, unable or unwilling to open the door between us.

This all happened in just a few seconds. I know this because Emily called down to say that the house phone wouldn't dial, and her mobile phone had no signal.

I'd pressed the Capture button what must have been twenty times, by now - I glanced up at the signal meter. Nothing.

Then he wasn't there any more.

Silence, and an empty airlock.

...well, there's not much you can say to that, is there? Being English, the kettle went on pretty much straight away.

The front door was locked and deadbolted, with no sign of entry forced or otherwise.

Of what turned out to be 22 pictures I captured, 19 were corrupted - just blocky green and purple nonsense. All but the first one had file modification dates seventy years in the future.

My laptop, Emily's laptop, and the computers of both of my housemates had crashed while I was downstairs watching the stranger. Three Windows machines borking all at once isn't all that unlikely, but my laptop runs Linux, so it's never crashed before now - and this was a doozy, lines of garbled graphics up and down the screen, completely frozen up.

Three circuit breakers needed reset, as I found out when I went around shakily turning on every light in the house.

We still haven't bothered involving the coppers. I mean, what would we even tell them?

This is reminding me of Solid Snake.
STRANGERS?
STRANGERS?!
STRAAAAAAANGERRRRRRRRRRS!!!!So.... From what Skidge is saying, this is confirming that this is, in fact, pulling of legs, and this is a new race.
So when can we expect to see these Strange beings?

Oh dear me Dan, you fumbled on this one. We can easilly tell that you've made this whoel thing up. You gave yourselves away when you said

my laptop runs Linux

and then expected us to believe it crashed.

Oh, I've crashed linux before. I'm a crash master. I probably crash my mac about once a week. Admittedly, it takes a lot more work to crash a linux, but it can be done.

by the way, mac crashes are my favorite. the screen turns greyscale from the top to the bottom, then a little box pops up in the middle saying "you need to restart your computer" in about 30 languages.

I've crashed every system I can get my hands on. Hell, I crashed my Android. And my PS3 running Puppy. And Windows 95-7 including 4 versions of Vista and 2 versions of 7. I even once managed to crash my windows explorer by connecting to dial-up and opening firefox withing 1 minute of the computer starting. That was interesting.

Also, I look forward to the strangeness.

You can toast them, but it's dark magic. - MotPax on hotdog buns.

Anonymous: Raimar

Thursday, October 28 2010 @ 10:59 PM UTC

That is seriously creepy, cuz if his hood were red, and the mask without the nose, that coulda been my halloween costume from two years ago.

Is my future self trying to tell you something? And I'm not invited? Harrumph!

Anonymous: A Lazy Bob

Thursday, October 28 2010 @ 11:33 PM UTC

Quote by: Raimar

That is seriously creepy, cuz if his hood were red, and the mask without the nose, that coulda been my halloween costume from two years ago.

Is my future self trying to tell you something? And I'm not invited? Harrumph!

Uh, Dan - in those photos you took - there seems to be a reflection of something - not trying to be funny, but it looks like a - potato? If there's such a thing as a 300 pound potato. It's centered on the - creature? in the first image, and off to one side in the other two.

Oh, and I realized it can't be Grampa, though the resemblance is striking - those gloves are clean!